Ascender Corporation
Encyclopedia
Ascender Corporation is a digital typeface
foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois
in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers and font-industry veterans who had previously been involved in developing font
s used widely in computers, inkjet printers, phones and other digital technology devices.
Currently Ascender Corporation markets both directly to consumers with font packs and individual fonts, and to original equipment manufacturers and software developers with custom font-design and implementation services. A portion of the company’s work since its founding has been in extending font glyph
s for international use and in the process of “hinting,” whereby characters are optimized for screen viewing.
, one of Ascender’s founding partners and lead type designer, worked on the Arial
and Times New Roman typefaces that Microsoft Corporation introduced in Windows 3.1 in 1992. These same fonts have been distributed in all subsequent versions of Microsoft Windows and recent versions of Mac OS. Since then Matteson has designed other fonts including Segoe, Microsoft’s current corporate branding font, Convection for the Xbox360, and the Liberation fonts
for Red Hat
’s Linux
Distribution. Some of Matteson’s other font designs include Andale Mono
, Andy, Curlz and Endurance.
Another founding partner of Ascender, Tom Rickner
, specializes in the technical nuances of digital typography, the production of non-Latin scripts and TrueType
font hinting. Rickner oversaw the development of the first TrueType fonts delivered in Apple Computer
’s System 7
in 1991. Most recently Rickner was involved in the development of Microsoft’s ClearType
font collection. He has also been involved in the design and production of many typefaces created for the digital environment including Georgia
, Graphite, Meiryo
, Nina, Tahoma
, Tekton and Verdana
.
for instance). Terminals are shorter and counters are generally more open. The italic
s are designed and not algorithmically slanted.
In 2005, Ascender announced that it entered into an agreement with Microsoft Corporation to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts
, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft in its software products and operating systems.
In that same year Ascender announced that it had a distribution agreement with IBM
to provide a range of Japanese fonts as well as a distribution agreement with Bigelow & Holmes Type Foundry to distribute the Lucida
family of fonts.
Also in 2005, Steve Matteson designed the fonts for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. Ascender’s type designers and font software engineers created custom fonts tuned specifically for high-quality display on-screen in the Xbox user interface
, as well as multilingual fonts to support the Xbox 360 branding and marketing around the world.
At the end of 2005 Ascender announced its first OpenType
Pro font, Pericles Pro. Pericles Pro is based on the work of Robert Foster who created the original designs for American Type Founders
in 1934. Each Pericles Pro font includes 433 glyphs. This includes 12 stylistic alternates and 17 ligatures to mix and match with a full set of capitals, small capitals, superscript, subscript and petite small capital letters.
In 2006 Ascender released numerous products for hardware and software developers including a font set that meets the EIA-708
-B standard for Digital TV Closed Captioning (DTVCC), large Unicode
compliant fonts and fonts for HD DVD
authors and publishers designed to enhance the on-screen experience that is part of an HD DVD's Advanced Content.
Also in 2006 Ascender introduced a software product for mobile phones – the Ascender Personality Kit. This software combined ring tones, wallpaper
backgrounds, themes and fonts into packaged sets that automated the process of acquiring and applying multiple components for users to personalize their Windows Mobile
phone.
In November, 2007 Ascender announced it had created the Droid
font family for the Android handset platform.
In 2007 Ascender executed a license to distribute the Microsoft scalable font engine that supports hinting technology to enhance on-screen legibility. Ascender also created the Liberation fonts
distributed by Red Hat. In the same year Ascender made the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection available to end users looking to utilize the fonts from the Microsoft Vista operating system on other platforms (including Mac, Unix and previous Windows versions).
Another Ascender study researched the free and shareware fonts that can be found on the most-popular Websites. The study analyzed more than 4500 TrueType
fonts that can be downloaded by Macintosh
, Windows and Linux users to determine their viability for use in linking downloadable fonts to web pages as part of the Cascading Style Sheets
(CSS) specification proposed by the W3C. The study found that out of the 4572 fonts tested, 4385 fonts (95.9%) failed one or more of six tests that were performed.
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
foundry and software development company located in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, Illinois
Elk Grove Village, Illinois
Elk Grove Village is a municipality located in northeastern Illinois adjacent to O'Hare International Airport and the City of Chicago. Elk Grove Village encompasses in land area with located in Cook County and located in DuPage County, Illinois. The population was 32,745 at the 2010 census...
in the United States. It was founded in 2004 by a team of software developers, typographers and font-industry veterans who had previously been involved in developing font
Font
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
s used widely in computers, inkjet printers, phones and other digital technology devices.
Currently Ascender Corporation markets both directly to consumers with font packs and individual fonts, and to original equipment manufacturers and software developers with custom font-design and implementation services. A portion of the company’s work since its founding has been in extending font glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
s for international use and in the process of “hinting,” whereby characters are optimized for screen viewing.
Type Designers
Steve MattesonSteve Matteson
Steven R. Matteson is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices...
, one of Ascender’s founding partners and lead type designer, worked on the Arial
Arial
Arial, sometimes marketed or displayed in software as Arial MT, is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts. Fonts from the Arial family are packaged with Microsoft Windows, some other Microsoft software applications, Apple Mac OS X and many PostScript 3 computer printers...
and Times New Roman typefaces that Microsoft Corporation introduced in Windows 3.1 in 1992. These same fonts have been distributed in all subsequent versions of Microsoft Windows and recent versions of Mac OS. Since then Matteson has designed other fonts including Segoe, Microsoft’s current corporate branding font, Convection for the Xbox360, and the Liberation fonts
Liberation fonts
Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono...
for Red Hat
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
’s Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
Distribution. Some of Matteson’s other font designs include Andale Mono
Andale Mono
Andalé Mono is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson for terminal emulation and software development environments, originally for the Taligent project by Apple Inc. and IBM...
, Andy, Curlz and Endurance.
Another founding partner of Ascender, Tom Rickner
Thomas Rickner
Thomas Rickner is an American type designer who, while Lead Typographer at Apple Inc., supervised the production of the first TrueType fonts released in 1991 as part of Apple’s System 7 operating system for the Macintosh...
, specializes in the technical nuances of digital typography, the production of non-Latin scripts and TrueType
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
font hinting. Rickner oversaw the development of the first TrueType fonts delivered in Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
’s System 7
System 7
System 7 is the name of a Macintosh operating system introduced in 1991.System 7 may also refer to:* System 7 , a British dance/ambient band* System 7 , 1991 album* IBM System/7, a 1970s computer system...
in 1991. Most recently Rickner was involved in the development of Microsoft’s ClearType
ClearType
ClearType is a trademark for Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for additional intensity variation. This trade-off is asserted to work well on...
font collection. He has also been involved in the design and production of many typefaces created for the digital environment including Georgia
Georgia (typeface)
Georgia is a transitional serif typeface designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for the Microsoft Corporation, as the serif companion to the first Microsoft sans serif screen font, Verdana. Microsoft released the initial version of the font on November 1, 1996 as part of the...
, Graphite, Meiryo
Meiryo
is a Japanese sans-serif gothic typeface. Microsoft bundled Meiryo with Office Mac 2008 as part of the standard install, and it replaces MS Gothic as the default system font for Vista on Japanese systems....
, Nina, Tahoma
Tahoma (typeface)
Tahoma is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for the Microsoft Corporation in 1994 with initial distribution along with Verdana for Windows 95....
, Tekton and Verdana
Verdana
Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Thomas Rickner, then at Monotype. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography group...
.
Products
In the same year that Ascender was formed, it released its first typeface, Endurance, with the design goal of high readability in both print and on screen. Endurance's design follows the Swiss model of Grotesque sans serifs. Capital letters are less constricted in proportion than other popular Grotesques (Arial and HelveticaHelvetica
Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.-Visual distinctive characteristics:Characteristics of this typeface are:lower case:square dot over the letter i....
for instance). Terminals are shorter and counters are generally more open. The italic
Italic type
In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
s are designed and not algorithmically slanted.
In 2005, Ascender announced that it entered into an agreement with Microsoft Corporation to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts
Core fonts for the Web
Core fonts for the Web was a project begun by Microsoft in 1996 to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. It was terminated in 2002. It included the proprietary fonts Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and...
, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft in its software products and operating systems.
In that same year Ascender announced that it had a distribution agreement with IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
to provide a range of Japanese fonts as well as a distribution agreement with Bigelow & Holmes Type Foundry to distribute the Lucida
Lucida
Lucida is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1985.There are many variants called Lucida, including scripts , serif , and sans-serif .Bigelow & Holmes, together with the TeX vendor Y&Y, extended the Lucida family with a full...
family of fonts.
Also in 2005, Steve Matteson designed the fonts for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft. Ascender’s type designers and font software engineers created custom fonts tuned specifically for high-quality display on-screen in the Xbox user interface
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
, as well as multilingual fonts to support the Xbox 360 branding and marketing around the world.
At the end of 2005 Ascender announced its first OpenType
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...
Pro font, Pericles Pro. Pericles Pro is based on the work of Robert Foster who created the original designs for American Type Founders
American Type Founders
American Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
in 1934. Each Pericles Pro font includes 433 glyphs. This includes 12 stylistic alternates and 17 ligatures to mix and match with a full set of capitals, small capitals, superscript, subscript and petite small capital letters.
In 2006 Ascender released numerous products for hardware and software developers including a font set that meets the EIA-708
EIA-708
CEA-708 is the standard for closed captioning for ATSC digital television streams in the United States and Canada. It was developed by the Electronic Industries Alliance.Unlike most DVB captions, CEA-708 captions are textual like traditional Line 21 captions...
-B standard for Digital TV Closed Captioning (DTVCC), large Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
compliant fonts and fonts for HD DVD
HD DVD
HD DVD is a discontinued high-density optical disc format for storing data and high-definition video.Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the standard DVD format...
authors and publishers designed to enhance the on-screen experience that is part of an HD DVD's Advanced Content.
Also in 2006 Ascender introduced a software product for mobile phones – the Ascender Personality Kit. This software combined ring tones, wallpaper
Computer wallpaper
Wallpaper is an image used as a background of a graphical user interface on a computer screen or mobile communications device. On a computer it is usually for the desktop, while for a mobile phone it is usually the background for the 'home' or 'idle' screen...
backgrounds, themes and fonts into packaged sets that automated the process of acquiring and applying multiple components for users to personalize their Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft that was used in smartphones and Pocket PCs, but by 2011 was rarely supplied on new phones. The last version is "Windows Mobile 6.5.5"; it is superseded by Windows Phone, which does not run Windows Mobile software.Windows Mobile is...
phone.
In November, 2007 Ascender announced it had created the Droid
Droid (font)
Droid is a font family created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile handsets and were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation...
font family for the Android handset platform.
In 2007 Ascender executed a license to distribute the Microsoft scalable font engine that supports hinting technology to enhance on-screen legibility. Ascender also created the Liberation fonts
Liberation fonts
Liberation is the collective name of four TrueType font families: Liberation Sans, Liberation Sans Narrow, Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono...
distributed by Red Hat. In the same year Ascender made the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection available to end users looking to utilize the fonts from the Microsoft Vista operating system on other platforms (including Mac, Unix and previous Windows versions).
Research
Ascender has conducted numerous typographic-related research projects including a study on the typefaces that appear on the front pages of America's top daily newspapers. This study identified the most popular typefaces, sources, and the pervasive use of custom fonts in newspaper design.Another Ascender study researched the free and shareware fonts that can be found on the most-popular Websites. The study analyzed more than 4500 TrueType
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript...
fonts that can be downloaded by Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
, Windows and Linux users to determine their viability for use in linking downloadable fonts to web pages as part of the Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
(CSS) specification proposed by the W3C. The study found that out of the 4572 fonts tested, 4385 fonts (95.9%) failed one or more of six tests that were performed.
See also
- Monotype CorporationMonotype CorporationMonotype Imaging Holdings is a Delaware corporation based in Woburn, Massachusetts and specializing in typesetting and typeface design as well as text and imaging solutions for use with consumer electronics devices. Monotype Imaging Holdings is the owner of Monotype Imaging Inc., Linotype,...
- Droid fontsDroid (font)Droid is a font family created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile handsets and were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation...
- Liberation fonts